Meadow Sound is the long, shallow inlet that closes Shyona's southern reach. For most of its length it is more marsh than open water, a shifting maze of brackish channels, reed flats, and mud banks that flood and drain twice a day with the tide. The farmland on its northern shore is the last in Shyona. The jungle on its southern shore belongs to the Krell.
That makes the Sound the seam of a frontier the Shyonan council prefers not to discuss. The Krell have been eating their way north through the drowned kingdoms of southeastern Ve for the better part of three centuries, and the Sound is roughly where that advance has stalled. Nobody stopped it. The Krell simply will not cross deep water, the same instinct that keeps them out of the Snakemarsh and the Blisterswamp further south. Where the tide runs, the Sound is its own wall. The danger is the western head, where the channels give out and the marsh firms into a neck of passable ground, and everything that has ever come north at Shyona has come through that neck.
The Tazumori Line
Along the northern shore, closing the dry gaps the tide does not, runs the Tazumori Line: an earthwork rampart backed by a flooded ditch and a chain of timber watch-forts, with belts of cut blackthorn hauled up from the Bloodwood and staked into the approaches. It is not the great stone wall the border ballads describe. Shyona's council never agreed to pay for stone, and never agreed to send its own people to stand on it. So the southern houses hired the work out. The Line is held by the Goldwatch, the mercenary companies of the Nameless Ones of Keshwindi, which means it is held almost entirely by exiles and the children of exiles, people Shyona once stripped of their names and turned out to die, now paid by the houses that turned them out to die instead on Shyona's behalf.
The garrison keeps the ditches flooded with sound-water wherever the ground allows. A Krell scout will throw itself at a palisade without hesitation. It will not willingly put the tide at its back, and the men on the Line have learned to fight with the water as their ally.
Low tide at the western neck. The mud goes out for half a mile, grey and steaming, stitched with the black lines of the blackthorn belts and the rotted stubs of pilings from forts rebuilt a dozen times. A Goldwatch lookout sits on the rampart with a brass horn and a tally-stick, counting the chitin-glints that move along the treeline and notching, hour by hour, how many went back.